The Frankish Reich

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/why-inflation-might-not-win-the-election-for-trump-7ca3353e?mod=economy_lead_pos1 https://www.ft.com/content/4d41ff6d-b30b-4c93-a6ac-680281d42ab7 https://www.wsj.com/opinion/consumer-price-index-inflation-jerome-powell-federal-reserve-monetary-policy-ce31bc1a?mod=economy_trendingnow_opn_pos2 https://www.wsj.com/personal-finance/millennials-personal-finance-real-estate-50742ffe https://www.wsj.com/opinion/trump-is-looking-like-a-loser-again-mar-a-lago-news-conference-2024-election-02ec5c8f?mod=opinion_trendingnow_article_pos1 Funny how the right seems to be agreeing with me a lot lately.

My hunch, not yet confirmed by polling: the rise of Harris in the polls isn't just about getting rid of the elderly Biden. It also gave people a chance to assess what they think about the economy today, and to realize that things are quite a bit brighter than the Old Man (Trump vs. Biden) Malaise suggested. Harris is running now against the backdrop of a strong economy. Historically that puts her in a very strong position, and Trump's harping on how everything is awful is beginning to sound completely untethered to reality.

Why doesn't this make you happy? Now we've got this "you stole my ideas, so you suck, but in a different way than you sucked before." What I listed are all objectively bad ideas. Ask any economist other than Peter Navarro. I prefer Harris because she's not all-in on the dumbest ones like tariff increases. Which would be huge under Trump.

No! I love my gas stove. I could be convinced to move to induction some day, but not anytime soon. There were Biden Administration agitators suggesting that. It's fair to point that out. But they didn't prevail. Instead we got an ordinary rule update that will have zero effect on the availability of new gas ranges.

I listened to the relevant part. I don't think JD said anything that controversial himself. But he's the guy who got used to nodding and agreeing with all kinds of nutty (yes, weird) opinions as he did the Trumpist Wing talk show/podcast circuit. What's weird here? Not the idea that extended (note: not nuclear) multi-generational families/households are good. It's always a step too far with these guys, so we get the silly stretch that postmenopausal women exist in order to serve their evolutionary role as grandmothers. And JD nods happily along.

A reader adds context: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/feb/20/wilco-frontman-jeff-tweedy-trumps-success-is-a-sign-of-how-broken-things-have-been With Donald Trump still leading the Republican charge for the White House, the songwriter and producer is toying with an intriguing musical footnote, which connects the rabble-rousing Republican and the protest singer, Woody Guthrie. “Woody wrote a song about Trump’s father called Old Man Trump,” says Tweedy, who so memorably popularised the folk master’s forgotten works on a series of acclaimed albums with Billy Bragg. “Trump senior was Woody’s landlord in Brooklyn and the song is about how much he hated him and what a racist he was.” As the prospect of the billionaire turned reality TV celebrity becoming the world’s most powerful man grows, Tweedy is considering playing the song in protest at what he calls the “grotesque” threat of a Trumped up America.

Exactly. Never assume that @B-Man has watched/read the news that his Twitter monkeys push out to him with misleading headlines. The case is about this election worker failing to disclose that he had another job at the same time, and that he neglected his duty to make sure that election ballot paper was properly distributed to Harris County precincts. Not exactly the exciting news promised by the tweet.

Weird. https://newrepublic.com/post/184888/jd-vance-weird-thoughts-older-women-postmenopausal-female-audio JD Vance agrees with some right-wing podcaster fool playing evolutionary biologist. He made it to this position - Senator, VP nominee - by sucking up to every alt-right nut for several years. So now here he is, forced to confront his past.

We've had standards for appliances for a long, long time. Most of them are simple health/safety standards. Some are efficiency standards. Other countries/regions have them too (see the EU). Do they sometimes overreach? Sure. Is this such a case? No.

Good point. I've suggested before that we have what's called a Zero Marginal Value employee here.

One might even call it a negligible percentage.

True. There are sensible ideas out there. They don't treat things like Social Security and Ethanol mandates as untouchable. These real ideas will never be enacted until there is a true crisis.

We last tried this during our Marxist phase, under a Leninist administration. The presidency of Richard M. Nixon. (It didn't work)

Everyone wants "ideas." Most "ideas" are bad ideas. Look at what this election season has give us so far: - huge tariff increases (Trump) - no taxes on tips (Trump, now Harris) - a "strategic" Bitcoin reserve (Trump) - some kind of price controls (Harris) My takeaway: We need fewer "ideas," not more.

That's true. I looked back to when she would've first taken (and failed) the bar exam. It had a 59.5% passage rate. That's really apples and oranges. I've said before that I recognize and accept the idea of different kinds of "intelligence." But when we're talking about something like standardized or professional exam-taking intelligence, it's a measure of general intelligence (the educational psychologist's "g," which is something like IQ, involving reasoning skills) plus hard work/study over a prolonged period (more applicable in something like the bar exam, which tests both g and accumulated knowledge of a field). Now Trump is fond of calling people "low IQ." He's not talking about some social skill here in reading people and making deals. That's a real thing, but a different thing. So if he's serious about putting up or shutting up, we'd need to see some old g-type test, like his SAT scores, which we could compare to Kamala's SAT/LSAT scores. I say bring it on.

Read the article. It explains what google's search algorithm did, and why it was designed to not encourage information about hypothetical assassination attempts. In this case, it didn't distinguish between the actual and hypothetical. A design flaw, in other words. One that would have done the same thing if Biden had been the victim. Get over your persecution complex.

I'm sorry, I thought the article was about putting Public Defenders on the bench.

Of course it isn't. But the billions of individual decisions that go into whether the market is up or down are reflecting a general optimism about economic conditions. One that is odds with "recession is upon us."

It's almost as if Google is ranking search results according to what is most relevant at the moment.

A chicken in every pot and two cars in every garage isn't a policy proposal. You gotta explain exactly how you'll make that happen.

Ahh, back to the days of this.

Doomed! The higher it goes, the harder it falls!

Inside job to do ... what? Delay the certification of the votes? You mean, doing Trump's bidding? And Trump was President at the time. Who would have an incentive to call-in a bomb threat? THE GUY WHO WANTS TO DELAY THE COUNTING OF THE VOTES. This is so stupid. Even for Julie Kelly it's stupid.

Relatable!

Certainly has a Four Seasons Landscaping feel, doesn't it?